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Zanyar Karimi knows little about the geopolitics that left him stranded along the Poland-Belarus border on Thursday night, unable to go forward or backward. But he did know that it was cold enough, as overnight temperatures hovered close to zero, that some among the crowd of about 3,000 asylum-seekers could die.
At least 11 have died, including a 14-year-old boy on the Belarusian side of the border on Thursday, according to aid groups, since the refugees hoping to reach Europe began arriving in Belarus over the summer. Poland has reported some 33,000 illegal attempts to cross its border this year, more than half in October.
Karimi says he has tried to cross the border five times, and made it into Poland twice, only to be pushed back into Belarus each time. Belarusian soldiers prevent the refugees from leaving the border area. The standoff is dangerous for more than just those trapped at the frigid frontier.
Doug Saunders: Lukashenko wants Belarus to be a walled prison. Europe will pay for the wall
Migrants from the Middle East and elsewhere warm up at the fire gathering at the Belarus-Poland border near Grodno, Belarus, Thursday, Nov. 11, 2021. The European Union has accused Belarus' authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko of encouraging illegal border crossings as a 'hybrid attack' to retaliate against EU sanctions on his government for its crackdown on internal dissent after Lukashenko's disputed 2020 re-election.Leonid Shcheglov/The Associated Press
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COP26 delegates stuck on major issues in carbon-emissions deal as deadline looms in Glasgow
The COP26 climate summit is in its final scheduled day with a deal to cut carbon emissions still a way off and several major issues, including whether to phase out coal and fossil-fuel subsidies, and how a carbon trading market would work, yet to be resolved among delegates.
A draft agreement was released, with the deadline for a final deal set for 6 p.m. local time on Friday, but COP26 president Alok Sharma acknowledged that negotiations could stretch into the weekend.
Delegates from nearly 200 countries are trying to cobble together a pact that will commit all nations to measures that will hold global warming to 1.5 C above preindustrial levels, which scientists say would limit the devastation caused by climate change. Current national plans fall far short of that target, and British officials have made “keeping 1.5 C alive” the mantra of COP26.
Read more: At COP26, Ugandan Vanessa Nakate’s powerful voice helps reframe climate activism
Toronto school board rejects Marie Henein book-club event
The organizer of a book club for teenage girls says she was told students from the Toronto District School Board would not attend one of her events because the featured author, lawyer Marie Henein, had defended Jian Ghomeshi on sexual-assault charges.
The board now says that was a misunderstanding.
A Room of Your Own Book Club invites teenage girls, many of whom come from low-income families, to read a text and then discuss it in a virtual space with the author. School principals and teachers promote the events to their students.
In late October, Tanya Lee said she was told by a school-board superintendent that the board’s equity department felt the lawyer would send the wrong message. “They told me straight out ‘no,’ because [Henein] defended Jian Ghomeshi and how do you explain that to little girls,” Lee said.
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ALSO ON OUR RADAR
Newfoundland police face crisis after sex-assault conviction against on-duty officer: Jane Doe, whose real name is protected by a publication ban, said that she was raped in 2015 when she was a 21-year-old community-college student by an on-duty RNC officer. The officer, Constable Doug Snelgrove, assaulted her in her own apartment, she said, after he offered her a ride home from a bar. The story she told would take more than six years and three trials to prove. Now, her case is forcing changes to policing in Newfoundland, and has created a crisis around the future of the RNC, a 400-officer organization dating back to 1729 that has long been a celebrated part of the province’s history.
Judge dismisses Maxime Bernier’s defamation case against Warren Kinsella over Project Cactus campaign: An Ontario Superior Court judge has dismissed Maxime Bernier’s lawsuit against political columnist Warren Kinsella, ruling that the People’s Party Leader failed to prove his defamation concerns outweighed the importance of protecting free speech in the political realm. In 2019, the Conservative Party had hired Kinsella and his consulting firm, Daisy Group, to run a “seek and destroy” effort called Project Cactus that aimed to discredit Bernier and his new party.
SNC-Lavalin CEO cancels public appearance as language debate in Quebec intensifies: SNC-Lavalin’s CEO Ian Edwards cancelled a largely English-language speech he was expected to deliver in Montreal next week amid growing scrutiny over the French-language abilities of Quebec’s anglophone business leaders. In a letter to the Canadian Club of Montreal that the company released, Edwards said he’s postponing the speech because he wants “to take the necessary time to better prepare my presentation and make sure it contains more French....”
These Toronto entrepreneurs inadvertently helped Facebook’s rebrand. Now, they’re fighting COVID-19: When Facebook Inc. debuted its new name, Meta Platforms Inc., last month, it had some Toronto entrepreneurs to thank for making the transition easier. Siblings Sam Molyneux and Amy Molyneux launched a startup called Meta more than a decade ago, creating a software that used artificial-intelligence techniques to help scientists sift through the world’s trove of research papers and stay on top of their peers’ findings. Meta’s success caught the attention of the philanthropic organization owned by Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan.
Listen to The Decibel: What scientists learned when COVID-19 made the world quiet: With humans forced into lockdown in much of the world as the pandemic took hold, COVID-19 gave scientists a rare opportunity to study just how much noise we make and what would happen if we stopped producing it. Three Canadian researchers joined the podcast to share what they learned during the Great Quieting of early 2020.
MORNING MARKETS
Investors wary of yields: European shares chalked up new highs on Friday as shock from unexpectedly strong U.S. inflation data earlier in the week eased, though investors kept a wary eye on rising yields as the U.S. dollar hit a 16-month high. Just after 5:30 a.m. ET, Britain’s FTSE 100 was down 0.55 per cent. Germany’s DAX and France’s CAC 40 gained 0.12 per cent and 0.25 per cent, respectively. In Asia, Japan’s Nikkei rose 1.13 per cent. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng advanced 0.32 per cent. New York futures were modestly higher. The Canadian dollar was trading at 79.46 US cents.
WHAT EVERYONE’S TALKING ABOUT
The pandemic is, more than ever, a pandemic of the unvaccinated
“In the pandemic equation, vaccination is like a giant minus sign. It strongly subtracts from COVID-19′s ability to infect, to make severely ill and to damage the economy. It’s not certain that vaccination alone can get Canada to the end of the pandemic, but it is by far the most effective tool available in pursuit of that goal.” - Editorial board
Biden’s milestone VP pick is looking more like a millstone
“Ten months do not a vice-presidency make. Maybe it’s just been growing pains. But there are real doubts about Kamala Harris’s skills as a retail politician. In her run for the Democratic presidential nomination, she displayed a striking inability to connect with voters, withdrawing from the race even before the first primary in Iowa. As Vice-President, she is displaying the same deficiency.” - Lawrence Martin
TODAY’S EDITORIAL CARTOON
Brian GableBrian Gable/The Globe and Mail
LIVING BETTER
The pantry’s rise to most fashionable space in the kitchen
The humble pantry is having a bit of a renaissance thanks to the pandemic, which unleashed a newfound zeal for stockpiling and organizing in a chaotic and unpredictable world. “COVID changed everything,” says Imogen Pritchard, the U.S. design director for Plain English Kitchens. “... People are using their kitchens more and getting creative about customization.”
These days, it’s not enough to store everything in its place. It’s all about incorporating next-level details and splashing out on statement colours.
MOMENT IN TIME: Nov. 12, 1840
French sculptor Auguste Rodin is born
French sculptor Auguste Rodin portrait with one of his sculptures behind him (postcard).Lebrecht Authors / Bridgeman Images
François-Auguste-René Rodin was born in an attic in the Mouffetard district on Paris’s Left Bank at noon on this day in 1840. His father was a low-paid police clerk; his mother took odd jobs cleaning and mending. The family could not afford glasses for the short-sighted Auguste: He found school painful but took refuge in drawing. After training at a trade school for artisans, he was rejected three times by the École des Beaux-Arts and underwent a long apprenticeship, crafting figures for buildings and monuments and creating small commercial figurines. In 1864, the official Salon, which still favoured allegorical and narrative sculpture, rejected The Man with the Broken Nose, the well-worn face of an old workman modelled in clay. It was not until 1877 that Rodin achieved fame with a shockingly lifelike nude male figure titled The Age of Bronze. That marked the beginnings of a three-dimensional art whose rough surfaces, weighty forms and psychological penetration would signal the arrival of modern sculpture. At his death in 1917, Rodin was still working on The Gates of Hell for a proposed museum, a frieze of figures that included The Thinker, one of the most familiar sculptures in the world. Kate Taylor
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